Juliet Nicolson

A call to farms: how a London barrister rediscovered her agricultural roots

Sarah Langford returns to the farming life of her childhood and finds blood, guts – and buttercups

Winter barley ripening in a field near the village of Holcombe in Somerset. [Matt Cardy/Getty Images] 
issue 16 July 2022

Farming threaded its way through the fields, mud, hedgerows and lifeblood of the people who made up Sarah Langford’s childhood. But her grandfather, ‘an oak of a man’ with his high-waisted trousers and ‘smelling of butter, honey and dust’, occupies no romantic sepia image in her memory. A tenant farmer, proud to have provided for the local Hampshire population during the second world war, he remains in the author’s mind a figure unfaded in achievement and identity.

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